Effects animation

after finishing all the backgrounds i need for the O2 commercial, I started to work on the simpler parts that don't involve character animation.
First I created images of an oxygen tank, a loaf of bread and some water bottles for the sequence "from the people who brought you sliced bread and bottled water, it's Oh!Tu."I drew the outlines in ink and shaded them with pencil, then adding additional shades in photoshop.
I used a drybrush technique to make the rays of light radiating from the objects, but used black paint, then inverted it and set them on a separate Photoshop layer on the "lighten" setting, at roughly 80% transparency. I also added additional beams of light in photoshop for the O2 cannister.


here is another little bit i worked on today:
Next I animated the tree bags opening and closing every 12-ish frames. The final drawings were done in charcoal then inverted and set to "lighten" in photoshop. Of course, by "animate," in this case i mean I drew three different frames: two extremes, & one in-between. It sound cheap, but the actions are very quick, and if you take a peak at my test video, you'll see it works well.

commercial Animation II

I put together a couple backgrounds for the oxygen commercial and placed a sketch of the character against them to see how they would look.

Commercial Animation

I had an idea for a fake commercial, and threw together a quick video with scribbles that took about 5 minutes to draw and audio that took about as long to record & mix.



Here is a more refined character design, kinda going for the early tv animated commercial look.

Eagle

this project was a request, my aunt wanted me to paint a wooden eagle my grandfather got my grandmother for christmas, and she wanted it done by memorial day.

Closin' in....

With a bit of free time on my hands, I finally am getting close to finishing an animated project that i started dec. 17th 2006.
It isn't that it was difficult, that it took time, or that it is a long project, it's just that i always have so many other more important things to do- like work, eat, sleep...and other projects i get involved in.

I have more than 2/3 of the thing inked now, and am still animating the other 1/3. Of the 2/3 i have inked, I have scanned in about 100 frames at 1180/880 pixel resolution, and 15 of those have been colored, textured, and placed against the background painting for a final framing.
The parts I haven't finished animated yet are 2 short opening and closing shots, and a close-up of the squirrel screaming in surprise and holding his face. Here are a couple of un-cropped frames from the close-up:

bugged out.

I did another small sculpture, this time of the daughter louse character.

Sugar and Spice and everything.... Lice?

After a bit of a struggle, I think I've hit upon a design for the daughter that I like. My first designs seemed too old, and I wanted the character to seem like a tween-ager, not a 20-something.


Here are some throw-away gags I want to put into the cartoon- The lice see "deer ticks" on their camping trip:

and for no real reason, here is the back of poppa louse's head.

Poppa Louse (enlarged to show detail)

I made a 3-d version of the headlouse character design to help me visualize him more fully, and get the tricky perspectives and camera angles right. The pose I selected was based on this sketch of the character.

I made the head, body, and arms as separate pieces for a couple reasons: first, so I could sculpt it more easily, without the clay all mushing together as I worked on details; and second, so that I could move them around afterwards as drawing references.


While the clay cooked, I figured out a basic color scheme using the sketch on which I based the pose in the model.


Then I mixed paints and proceeded to apply color to the finished sculpture.